WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday cut the duration of deportation protections and work permits for 521,000 Haitians covered by a temporary program so that they will expire in August, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said.
The decision reverses a Biden administration move last year to extend the protections through February 2026, the spokesperson said, saying the extension was unjustified.
President Donald Trump, a Republican, tried to end most enrollment in the Temporary Protected Status program during his 2017-2021 presidency but was blocked by federal courts.
Noem has already revoked a Biden-era TPS extension for some 600,000 Venezuelans and terminated the status for around half of them, whose protections and access to work permits expire in April.
Trump falsely said during a September 2024 debate with Democrat Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets, sparking fear of retaliation among Haitians in the city. Trump said a month later that if elected he would revoke TPS for Haitians and deport them.
Noem will now need to decide whether to terminate the status for Haitians.
“President Trump and I are returning TPS to its original status: temporary,” she said in a statement.
TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event.
More than a million people, over half of them children, are displaced within Haiti, where gang violence continues unabated despite the start of a United Nations-backed security mission last year, U.N. data published in January showed.
Haiti has lacked elected representatives since 2023 and has not held elections since 2016. The country’s capital is almost entirely controlled by armed gangs, and leaders have said security must first be established to hold a free and fair vote.
A pair of lawsuits filed this week challenged the Trump administration moves to roll back TPS for Venezuelans.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson; Editing by Deepa Babington and Rosalba O’Brien)
